Announcing Jetpack SDK 0.5

The Jetpack team is excited to announce the launch of Jetpack SDK 0.5. This latest release offers more APIs for you to build add-ons with. For instance, one of the new APIs enables you to access tab information and control tab-related actions, e.g. opening/closing tabs.

The new APIs in Jetpack SDK are:

Tabs API – Provides easy access to tabs and tab-related events.

Request API – Lets you easily make network requests.

Load/unload reasons – Add-ons can now find out when they are being loaded for the first time after being installed or enabled and unloaded because they are being uninstalled or disabled.

Localization API – Provides simple localization functionality. It makes it possible to retrieve localized versions of the strings in your code. And it doesn’t require you to solicit localizations from localizers or bundle localizations with your code, as the module retrieves them automatically from a web service based on the strings your code is using.

Selection API – Provides a means to get and set current text/HTML selections as well as observe new selections.

And in case you have not been following the latest Jetpack developments, we also launched Page Worker, Widget, Simple Storage and Private Browsing APIs in previous releases. A complete list of APIs can be found in the core library reference.

If you’re new to the Jetpack project, it aims to make it easy to build Firefox add-ons using common Web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS; and with this latest release, building Firefox add-ons has never been easier!

One response

Why is there no documentation for ‘window-utils’, ‘xul-app’, ‘xpcom’, ‘errors’ or ‘cuddlefish’ in the core library? I don’t really want to have to piece together bits of sample code from everywhere just to learn how to use the API. Plus, aren’t the videos on the home page out of date now?

I do want to code my own extensions, but the current state of the project is stopping me from achieving this easily.